The first sub-question is: “How much time do I have to prepare?” Events are typically a multi-month planning process, a thought everyone should consider before delving into an event. Events tend to swell to fill the amount of time you have available to throw it, but a good rule of thumb is you should be at least three months out before your proposed date. Prep for larger, weekend long events can take up to a year in advance. Larger, more established crews who are continuing a story have it a bit easier, because their world is already created. If you are franchising another story and throwing a side-plot off of it, you might be able to borrow a lot of that skeleton for you to flesh out.
Also consider what else you have going on in your life so that you can carefully plan. This might seem like a somewhat obvious question, but the event is probably going to dominate your life for a day or two a week and a couple of weeks before your actual date.
The next facet is to understand where that effort ends after the event. Are you going to throw a one-shot? Do you want to start a new epic plotline? Again, you see too many people come out swinging too large for their event staff and they end up with burnt staff, disappointed players, and yet another storyline that has gone nowhere. I have made this mistake as well, and have since learned that you need to earn your epicness. Oftentimes the best first event is one where you solidly execute on the vision and leave yourself a couple of breadcrumbs to keep the story going.
You will also need to ask yourself, how far out ahead of the event do I need to plan to properly plug it? If you are three months out, and you have a blank piece of paper, you had better start writing like crazy to get something frameworked enough to plug by the time your event comes into focus about two months out. The question of whether to plug and how is a more complex one that we’ll take separately.
Lastly, who is on your team? We’ll dig into that more next week, but how committed are they to helping you put your vision together? If you are a part of a larger team and have signed up to do some modules or author some content, how much can you sign up for? Remember that you have to be careful about disappointing, and if you must, disappoint early.
There’s a saying in Realms that goes “Real Life comes first”, which is an axiom that I first heard at WPI to help kids pass college. It means that you need to protect your real life before committing to the game, despite how short- and long-term rewarding it might seem. Time management in event holding is a huge piece of getting a quality event done, and doing it in a way that you don’t want to kill the people you are working with. You can tell a rush job when you see one, and making sure that you are organized, well-executed, and you “cut to completion”. We’ll talk about content cutting in a future question, but in general, you want to have so much that you can pare down your weakest bits.
A good basic schedule you might consider is if you’re coming in cold: 3 months for a one day that includes a night quest (6hr+3hr), weekly meetings, and two crunch weeks ahead of time. In my past experience, having an established plotline only reduces the crunchtime. There are a lot of additional factors that you need to take into account when you have an established playerbase, but your basic prep is done. It’s more like 4 months for a 2 day in a configuration like Fri-Sat Night (two nights and a day) or Sat->Sun (two days and a night).
Next, let’s talk about your staff.